Comment by JPYamamoto on 05/07/2020 at 02:27 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

View submission: A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web

I didn't get to experience the internet back in the good ol' days, but I really like the style (or lack of it) that it used to have, at least from what I've seen on the wayback machine and a few websites that have stayed the same over time.

The internet has strayed apart from its original philosophy. It used to be very straightfoward, nowadays it's way too unnecessarily fancy.

And maybe that's not a bad thing. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to the internet while it didn't use to be that way. And there must be a reason to that.

But still, I can't deny that I wish the internet was a little more like it used to be.

Replies

Comment by Shaper_pmp at 05/07/2020 at 10:10 UTC*

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

> The internet has strayed apart from its original philosophy. It used to be very straightfoward

By "the internet" you actually mean "the web", and when the web was introduced into an internet which at the time ran almost entirely on plain text, it was the *very definition* of "unnecessarily fancy", with formatted headings and text, inline images, etc.

If you want the web to be like it was, just turn off JS in your browser, add a user-stylesheet to override all sites' CSS and set it back to your browser default. Nobody actually does it because the user-experience is all kinds of ass, but you have the option if you want.

Ultimately - I would argue *empirically* - most people prefer a dynamic, active web with client-side scripting, *or else they would turn off browser features en masse and website owners would be forced to support users without those features*.

As statistically almost nobody actually does it, it's safe to assume that most people don't want it, small irritants like CSS popups and ad-scripts aside.